Voters in the 18th Judicial District haven't exactly enjoyed strong, steady leadership from their district attorney over the past four years. In fact, Carol Chambers, who is seeking re-election, has a long record of turmoil. She has been involved in one brouhaha after another since taking office in 2004. There has been an exodus of prosecutors from her office. She was accused of th...

The Denver Post does not exactly have a sterling reputation when it comes to DA Chambers.

The public censure that it refers to was the result of a political show trial that the Post was promoting heavily just prior to the 2006 election. The trial could easily have been made more credible by scheduling it two weeks later. Had that happened, there is a good chance that she would have received no penalty as the Republican she was protecting was very much a victim of the legal system. I would hope that she would protect a Denver Post editor who was similarly victimized in exactly the same way.

The Denver Post made it impossible for Attorney Regulation, which normally doesn't punish any attorney for anything short of theft, to avoid issuing some penalty.

The range of possible penalties was much more severe than censure. While the trial was hyped before the election, the results were announced on the deadest news day of the year, Dec 26. Does the hand slap penalty and the timing of that announcement suggest that the Post was way over the line with its coverage?

It is my view that the Post editorial board is very willing to overlook severe misconduct by the legal system that involves Democrats - it stopped reporting on the Supreme Court's handling of former judge Manzanaras the second it became possible that the state court administrator might have been obstructing justice and never called for a criminal investigation - but it hyped Republican DA Chambers political show trial, and still does.

When it comes to reporting on the legal profession, you folks are nothing but enablers. I hope that it comes back to haunt you.

Meanwhile, try to ensure that your own hands are clean before you issue opinions like this. They are not.

Wow, anon, Carol Chambers is now a victim of bad press? That is revisionist history at its finest. To summarize, Chambers called a lawyer who was trying to collect a debt against a Republican crony and a client of Carol's husband. In that phone call Chambers threatened to call the attorney before a grand jury and potentially face (completely bogus) criminal charges. On top of it, Chambers denied she made the threat and then when confronted with the evidence changed her story. In the opinion of many, given the severity of her abuse of power, her punishment was light. To say that she was only punished because of the press is simply and moronically wrong.

Do not forget that her office was also thrown off a murder case because Chambers continued to use as an adviser an Attorney General who had previously represented the defendant. This was an obvious conflict that any reasonable lawyer would have recognized, but Chambers failed to, with the result that the entire prosecution has to be moved, with substantial additional cost to the taxpayers.

Despite these and other issues Chambers has shown no remorse, no concern and continues to act like she is the only moral human in the 18th Judicial District. Her opponent may have issues, but it is difficult to see Chambers as a victim of anything but her own ethical blind spots.

I haven't been called a moron for a long time, but most people are probably not as observant as you.

Both the Rocky and the Post reported that the lawyer she threatened was attempting to collect on checks that had been stolen and forged. The "debt" wasn't a debt that I would want to be paying if it happened to me, but I am, as you observe, of lower than average intelligence, a moron. Lend me some of your blank checks. Lawyers get triple damages plus attorneys fees for bad checks, which may not be unreasonable, but it is unreasonable in this circumstance.

Regardless, you miss, or avoid my point.

When the Post editorial board gets consistent in their coverage of the legal profession and the contrast between their coverage of Chambers and the state court administrator is a perfect illustration of how inconsistent they are, I will have some respect for them, and not before.

Sad situation Chambers has created. I used to work there and it's painful to see the hardworking people she has fired, or "poked at" until they quit for the most trivial reasons. She thinks it's a game, but with 75% turnover in 3 years, the taxpayers are picking up the tab. What's been in the news is the tip of the iceberg. Female career prosecutors were told they were too fashionable, and therefore "too cheerleader" to be DA's. Cops have told me they can't even recruit new officers from anywhere in the state to their department until she's gone. Cops fear, justly, that she will pick someone out and destroy him or her at will. Bottom line, the county commissioners should have reined her in, with her cronyism and religious agenda, a long time ago but her husband is the chair of the Republican party and very powerful.

A Watcher wrote:Both the Rocky and the Post reported that the lawyer she threatened was attempting to collect on checks that had been stolen and forged.

I see. So a district attorney acts improperly, which last I checked is something We The People are entitled to know since we elected her, and the Post is wrong to publicize it?

I once had a collection agency try to collect an invalid debt from me, and I found (without a law degree, natch) that under federal law, all a debtor has to do to stop collection efforts is to dispute the validity of a debt and prove it invalid. This is what I had to do. It's a pain, but Ms. Chambers, being a district attorney, should have been familiar enough with the law to recommend this course of action to her friend.

But she crossed the line BIG TIME when she intervened, and went way off the reservation when she threatened criminal action against this collector. She had this coming.

I am amazed that a newspaper which claims to place such an emphasis on high quality reporting and commentary would stoop so low as this hatchet job of an editorial. You can always count on mass media like the Denver Post to emphasize "brouhahas" in an editorial without even bothering to address the single most important question in this race: Which candidate will best protect the community and evenhandedly enforce the laws of this state?

I can tell you this, Carol Chambers has done more to put repeat offenders in prison than any other elected official in this state. Before she took office, habitual criminals would routinely get plea bargains that resulted in them serving a fraction of the sentence they originally faced. Similarly, people who escaped from halfway houses, generally having multiple felony convictions, used to get nothing more than a year tacked onto their sentences. Carol changed that by imposing stiff new policies on habitual criminals and escape cases that have resulted in VASTLY higher penalties for repeat offenders, often three or four times higher than what they would have received in other jurisdictions or in the eighteenth judicial before she took office.

By that measure, Carol has been a terrific success. How do I know this? I work for her and was here to see those changes put into place. If you don't believe me, ask the defense attorneys who call Arapahoe county "Arapahell" because of the stiff plea bargain policies, or the thousands of victims who have seen offenders properly punished, or ask a crook, if you can find one, and ask them which district in this state they would LEAST like to be prosecuted in. I guarantee the answer will be Arapahoe and Douglas County. Heck, you could even ask all the former DA's office employees who are behind Brauchler's candidacy, and they will be hard pressed to deny this too.

I haven't heard anything about what George Brauchler plans to do to make this community safer. All the Post seems interested in is brouhahas, and all Brauchler's bloggers seem interested in is talking about how terrible Carol Chambers is.

So if you care about the most important job of any district attorney, protecting the community, you might want to consider voting for the candidate who has proven she can do that.

We appreciate the candor regarding Ms. Chambers' record while in office. Needless to say, her lack of ethics has been disturbing and word is, there is a pending grievance right now from a purported victim that is receiving real scrutiny.

There has been no mention of the Azar connection and this PAC he formed to fund her campaign -- which was covered by the Rocky. I wish the Post would follow that up. Must be a favor being paid back somewhere along the line, eh? Of course, I have the answer . . .

Try 02-CR-752. Involved a forged release and a double vehicular assault. Who did the forging? That's for you to figure out. Who uncovered it? None other than Ms. Chambers and her band of investigators. What were the consequences? Ask Ms. Chambers about that -- maybe put a call into the strong arm as well. His $60K shows he remembers . . . .

Ms. Chambers acts as if she has the final say so on all matters of ethics. Well, the rules she is to follow tell us that when she knows of unethical conduct, she must tell the Supreme Court. Ask her about that in the context of the case above.

Seems like George Brauchler is the only choice for DA. You may not like the stance he took regarding gays in the military, but the guess here is that the Republican voters in the 18th don't like gays in the military!

Thank you from me as well Denver Post. As an Aurora resident, Ms. Chambers has been an embarassment and an expensive DA as well. Arapahoe Co. voters had to pay $100,000.00 from our tax dollars to defend her when she got in trouble with the Office of Attorney Regulations. Gee, thanks, Carol. I am personally going to vote for George Brauchler.

The Post seemed bent on finding a negative about George Brauchler and could only find a comment he made last year on the radio concerning gays in the military. Your editorial claimed you could find no context whree his comment about "kids in a candy shop" was appropriate. In addition you did not even contact him for a comment on this issue, which is not fair. Had you contacted him he might have replied as he did last year on this matter.

"The current policy attempts to achieve for homosexuals what physical segregation attempts to achieve for men and women. It creates a barrier that serves to suppress sexual conduct between soldiers, conduct that tends to destroy discipline, unit cohesion and mission accomplishment. If sexual conduct between soldiers who tend to be attracted to one another could be controlled by regulations alone, the military should require men and women and open homosexuals to shower, bunk and live together. Common sense dictates that this is like "putting a kid in a candy shop," whether that kid is homosexual or heterosexual. "

George deserved fairer treatment from the Post especially in view of the importance of the office he is seeking.

DA Chambers, contrary to my early expectations, is doing a good job. An election is a report card on performance. The DA is tough on criminals. She ensures society's monsters get the death penalty--something that bothers a liberal newspaper. As for me, I feel significantly safer knowing those killers are off the street and will discover the one axiom that our liberal press seems to forget: Actions have consequences. I give her an ???A??? grade and encourage voters to renew her contract with them for another four years.